Californians know brush grows back after a fire or a thinning, and will need to be cut back again after a few years.
So it is with bad ideas in the Legislature. They just keep coming back.
Almost 10 years ago, the Legislature suspended a $150 annual fee the state imposed on residents of the State Responsibility Area. This is the zone outside of cities and the valley bottoms where CalFire has primary responsibility for responding to wildland fires.
The fee had only been in place for six years, and it was suspended for very good reasons.
It was only created in the first place as an act of desperation as the state looked to balance its budget at the bottom of the Great Recession.
It was unfairly imposed based on a decades-old bureaucratic designation that means little for modern wildfires.
It fell on rural homeowners with no accounting for their residences’ values or their risk, and with only a token reduction for those already paying assessments for their own local fire districts.
It was called a fee, but in practice it was a tax – a tax that was illegally passed without the two-thirds vote of the Legislature required by the state constitution. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association spent years in litigation with the state to overturn the SRA fee, and the association’s lawyers likely would have won if the fee had not been suspended.
It wasn’t even a good tax from the state’s perspective. It was expensive to collect and exceptionally error-prone, with bills going out to thousands of residents who owed nothing and others just going uncollected.
And, let’s be blunt: It felt like an attack on rural California, as if rural residents are to blame for the state’s fire problem. There are people who hear the news of fires and say people should not have been living out in those places to begin with. But as we’ve seen in the terrible past decade, from Santa Rosa to Paradise to the Pacific Palisades, fires respect no jurisdictional boundaries and the fiercest destruction is in towns and cities – even the state’s largest.
But now the fire tax is back, and Senate Bill 1404, which would reinstate it permanently, has already cleared the hurdle of two Senate committees in April – both on party-line votes.
The groups trying to revive the SRA fee say the state needs every dollar it can get to address climate change and invest in wildfire prevention. I fully agree that consistent, long-term funding for fuels reduction, healthy watersheds and safe communities is vital for all Californians’ future safety. Our state budget must reflect that work as a key priority – not neglect it and then scramble for gimmicky taxes to fill the holes left by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s out-of-control spending.
It is a difficult budget year in Sacramento. Legislators will have to make choices and make some people unhappy in the process. But California is already the No. 2 state in the nation in the amount of money its governments – state and local – collect from its citizens, and is nearly double any neighboring state, according to the Tax Foundation. Solving Sacramento’s budget problem with one more tax – let alone one so capricious, unfair and inefficient – is the last thing voters need.
I wish we could stop these bad ideas once and for all, but just like the work of pruning the trees and cutting the brush, fighting Sacramento’s itch to raise your taxes is labor that truly never ends.